 So, some of you might remember the year ago one of the influences on American history that a name people don't know so well is Edward Bernays, who is really a master propagandist. And for a long time, before there was the term advertising, we just used the word propaganda. And so, he's a fascinating character. And our speaker this afternoon, Michael Rectonwald, is in some ways an analogy to him in the sense that he understands the use of language and propaganda by the state and by the left almost as skillfully perhaps as Edward Bernays once did. But the difference, and I'm happy to say so, is that Michael Rectonwald's on our side. So please give him a big round of applause. Thank you, Jeff. And it's great to be here. I see I've been a butt of a joke already. I will tell you that I am. I assure you a civil libertarian. Some might consider me an uncivil one, however, thus the anti-PC NYU prof. Okay, so let's begin. I'm talking about the Google election. That's the title of my talk. And the essay will be available online soon after the talk is finished at Michael Rectonwald.com essays. It'll be on the top there. Not be evil may not be Google's official company motto, but it remains the last sentence of its code of conduct. As part of not being evil, Google maintains that everything, everything it does in connection with its work will be and should be measured against the highest possible standards of ethical business conduct. Apparently, Google does not deem it unethical to fire an employee for expressing the research-based view that differences between the sexes slash genders may include occupational proclivities. Google must not consider it unethical to blacklist conservative or otherwise non-leftist news sites and websites. Google must not consider it unethical to autocomplete searches with the most patent nonsense imaginable. Men can have periods. It was worse, but I can't get back to the original where it said men can have babies. Google maintains that factual search results representing the world as it is amounts to algorithmic unfairness and changing them to desired results using machine learning fairness is highly ethical. Is a representation faculty accurate? Can it still be algorithmically unfair? Yes. For example, imagine that a Google image query for CEOs shows predominantly men. Even if it were factually accurate representation of the world, it would be an algorithmic unfairness because it would reinforce a stereotype about the role of women in leadership positions. Likewise, they say basically non-ideological, non-altered search results represents unfairness while fairness is the result of informational affirmative action results manipulation. In some cases, algorithmically ranking search results in favor of leftist or left-leaning politics and downranking conservative or right-wing sites is most ethical. It must consider rating the expertise, authoritiveness, and trustworthiness of websites using Wikipedia as meeting the highest ethical standards. Fact-checking only conservative or non-leftist views often wrongly is highly ethical. Discrimination against populist political movements and campaigns in favoring other establishment movements and campaigns meets the highest possible ethics standards. YouTube's routinely demonetizing and censoring conservative or otherwise non-leftist content is ethical. Bombarding users with political ads based on their search profiles and especially bombarding leftists, non-leftists rather with items having a leftist perspective match, represents the highest ethics. Blatant discrimination of the intent or the intent to prevent the reelection of a U.S. presidential candidate using search rankings meets the highest standards of ethics since, quote, biased search rankings can shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20 percent or more as Robert Epstein and Ronald E. Robertson conclude. In the wake of the riots across U.S. cities over the past several months, I ran a Google search for, quote, left-wing violence. The top two results from the Guardian and the New York Times respectively were entitled white supremacists behind the majority of U.S. domestic terror attacks in 2020 and far right groups are the most, behind the most terrorist attacks report fines. This is a highly ethical result, no doubt, especially when information on leftist violence was sought and no such shortage of such articles exists. This is especially ethical since the search analytics industry has found that the top three search results on Google drive 70 percent of clicks. I ran a search for will Democrats deal the election and the top five search results were about Trump stealing the election. Then I ran a search for will Trump steal the election and of course all 10 were about Trump stealing the election. Now all but leftists realize that, all but leftists realize that big digital corporations like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and others, they lean hard left and squelch opposing views to the point of creating an alternative reality. But few ask why they are apparently leftists let alone satisfactorily answering the question to my satisfaction that is. How are we to understand the blatant and well documented leftist bias and the censorship of non-leftist views by these companies? Why leftist? Is the internet leftist merely because those in Silicon Valley have been indoctrinated into leftism? And should we adopt the view that since Google, Facebook, Twitter and others are private enterprises that they can be as biased and censoring as they like? After all, aren't these private platforms? They have no obligation to represent views with which they disagree. They are no more obliged to do so than I am obliged to allow some antifa member into my home to spout his, her or their beliefs. These are the kinds of questions that I want to address in this talk. The answer should go a long way toward explaining the disavowed yet blatant attempts on the packed part of big tech internet companies to decide the 2020 election and much more. To me, it's more of a concern that they care so much and that tells me something's at stake. The governmentalization of private industry. This I think will explain what's going on. In Google Archipelago, the digital gulag on the simulation of freedom, I argue that big digital goliaths like these act as appendages of the state. They are state apparatuses or to use a postmodern neologism, they are governmentalities. Michelle Foucault referred to by governmentalities to the means by which the populace comes to govern itself as it adopts and personalizes the imperatives of the state or how the governed adopt the mentality desired by the government, thus govern mentality. One might point to masking and social distancing as instances of what Foucault meant by his notion of governmentality. This governmentalization of private enterprise and not the privatization of governmental agencies and functions that left this decry is the real problem with neoliberalism as I see it. And what are these governmentalities and why do I say these are governmentalities? There's neoliberalism. For clear and pertinent examples of governmentalities in this sense, consider the government contractors that comprise the so-called shadow government. As depicted in the documentary Shadowgate, which was banned from YouTube after just one day, which tells me that I must have had something true in it. According to two whistleblowers who worked for military-industrial intelligence contractors for many years, government contractors like Dynology, Global Strategies Group, Canadian Global Information, and many others engage in intelligence projects that include interactive internet activities. As one whistleblower put it, unlike what most people think, our intelligence doesn't stay within our borders or within our federal buildings. They can say that again. Such social media psychological warfare and social media influence operators seem to rely on masses of data that social media and other sources provide and are designed to influence individuals, groups, or population to behave in ways desired by the deep state or other customers. Desired behaviors include voting for particular candidates, supporting desired political movements and outcomes, opposing undesired political candidates' movements and outcomes, both at home and abroad. According to Shadowgate, whistleblowers, social media psychological warfare, which includes fake news, was initially developed for intelligence agencies, but has since been sold and used by intelligence contractors independently. They claim that social media psyops were employed in an attempt to trump to Russia and discredit his campaign. Of course, the dominant narrative is that Russia actually used psyops to interfere in the election. They also claim that the quote-unquote protests after the death of George Floyd were actually whipped up by fearmongers, by Russian-initiated fearmongers, also undertaking psyops. What does this have to do with Google, Facebook, and other digital media companies? IIA operations use and mine their sites, apparently gaining immunity from fake news designations. But these platforms are more than passive participants in personal data mining, social media psychological warfare games, and social media influence operations. A brief look at their inception, funding, and history should make this clear. The state and state-connected funding of Google and Facebook. First, both Google and Facebook received startup capital directly from the US intelligence agencies. In the case of Facebook, the startup capital came through Peter Thiel, Axel Partners, and Greylock Partners. These funding sources either received their funding from or were heavily involved in In-Q-Tel. In 1999, CIA funded and created In-Q-Tel, its own private-sector venture capital investment firm, to fund promising startups that might create technologies useful for intelligence agencies. As St. Paul research analyst Jody Codley notes, In-Q-Tel funded Thiel startup from Planet Tier somewhere around 2004. In 2004, Axel Partners, James Breyer, sat on the board of directors of military defense contractor BBN with In-Q-Tel CEO Gilman Louie Howard Cox, the head of Greylock, sat on the board of In-Q-Tel's directors. In the case of Google as independent journalist and former vice reporter Nafees Ahmed has detailed at great lengths, the CIA was deeply involved in funding Google. They have connections with the intelligence community and military that run very deep. Ahmed details the relationships with DARPA officials which yielded startup funding and direct funding from the intelligence community followed. The IC saw in the internet unprecedented potential for data collection and the upstart search engine venture represented a key to gathering it. In 2003, Google began customizing its search engine under the special contract with CIA for its end-to-link management office overseeing top secret and sensitive but unclassified intranets for CIA and other IC agencies according to Homeland Security today. In 2004, Google purchased Keyhole which was initially funded by In-Q-Tel. In 2005, Google began developing Google Earth and then In-Q-Tel announced its sales of Google stock in 2005 which kind of made it clear that they owned part of it. In short, Google was incubated, nurtured and financed by interests that were directly affiliated or closely aligned with US military intelligence community, many of whom were embedded in the Pentagon Highlands Forum. Second, unless I be accused of the genetic fallacy as I was last time I spoke about this at Amis's event, it should be noted that Google technologies were developed largely in connection with the IC and military and thus they bear the airmarks of the IC and military interests and Google's contracts with the IC have continued. Moreover, these platforms and social media outfits fully cooperate with the IC and military handing over data to the NSA upon demand and granting them backdoor access to data. Google was a deep state asset from its inception and remains one to this day. Furthermore, it is possible that the tools developed by the IC and military have been acquired by private contractors that are being used by these on platforms and social media to giants to influence the behavior of users and their services. This goes on so they've actually sold this software to the military and the intelligence community then they get them back and use them elsewhere on their own behalf and for their own intents and purposes. In short, Google, Facebook and others are not strictly private sector entities. They are governmentalities in the sense that I have given to the term. They are extensions and apparatuses of the state. Furthermore, these platforms are governmentalities with a particular interest in the growth and extension of governmentality itself. This includes championing every kind of subordinated and newly created identity class that they can find or create because such endangered categories require the state acknowledgment and protection. Thus, the state's circumference continues to expand. Big digital is partial to the interest and growth of the state. It not only does business with deep status but also shares their values. This helps make sense of the leftist bent and their preference for the deep state Democrats. Leftism is statism. Now, Russia, Russia, Russia or China. This talk would be incomplete without the discussion of China, the actually existing socialism in our midst, or socialism with Chinese characteristics. Much ink has spilled, of course, and many airwaves congested with the Russian interference narrative. NERI does a day go by without multiple references to Russia's attempts to influence or interfere in US elections using social media. We know the story. But the recent revelations about the business dealings of Biden and Sun in China brought the issue to fore about China in a few outlying social media and media outlets. Likewise, it is worthwhile to consider the differences between the objectives of these respective state-driven domains. For the Russian Federation, which has emerged as the West's chief spoiler, the goal has been to exacerbate existing social tensions in liberal democracies, et cetera, et cetera. China, on the other hand, has pursued an arguably more sophisticated approach given that it seeks gradually to supplant the Western order rather than simply undermine it. Its efforts, therefore, have been geared primarily around obtaining longer-term leverage through multiple channels of influence among elites in politics, business, and society. Of the many tactics it uses to advance its agenda of actively shaping foreign perceptions and behaviors, China practices what Victor Cha, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, called predatory liberalism. China leverages vulnerabilities of market interdependence to exert power over others in pursuit of its goals. In accommodating their state customers and ideological sponsors, the dominant search and social media platforms have come to resemble the governments that they effectively serve and reproduce. This is especially true where China is concerned. Google, Facebook, and Twitter have adopted the CCC's pension for the regulation of speech, the dissemination of propaganda, and the suppression of dissident views. A few examples of direct interventions in such search-related and social media control should suffice. Facebook blocked posts that reference a Chinese virologist whose research traced the SARS-2 virus to a Wuhan lab. Six Chinese nationals now work on Facebook's hate speech engineering team to produce algorithms that rank and block content deemed too conservative, among other tasks. Twitter purged tens of thousands of accounts critical of the Chinese government just days ahead of the 30th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre on June 4th, 2019. Twitter employees train Chinese officials to amplify their pro-China messaging for no charge. YouTube has deleted comments critical of the Chinese Communist Party due to quote unquote error. And in a case of self-contradictory and non-fact checking of dubious coronavirus claims, Twitter allowed over 90,000 tweets from beginning from April through May, 2020, from 200 diplomatic and state-run media accounts that suggested that the coronavirus originated in the U.S. or the U.S. military, among other claims casting doubt on its Chinese origins. These are but a few examples of influence campaigns and tactics employed by China, but they do not represent the most egregious cases of the censorship and propaganda we're encountering. Most of the censorship and propaganda is domestically oriented and produced. My point here is more about shared ideological commitments than tactics and tactics than anything else. Now back to the election. Trump or not Trump? How does all this figure into the election? It is clear that this presidential election has not been a contest between Trump and Joe Biden per se, but between Trump and not Trump. In a contest between a boorish, rambling irreverent and politically incorrect gatecrusher versus a corrupt veteran of the political class, the resistance which includes the mainstream media, the social media and globalist oligarchy, the neo-cons, the better part of the intelligence community and an assortment of leftist political activists and radicals aimed at destroying the prior and supporting the latter. The political establishment has shown its sheer cynicism by propping up an enfeebled high stakes influence peddler and having him taken seriously. I've considered the possibility that the anti-Trump fervor has been based largely on aesthetic revulsion. Indeed, aesthetic revulsion has been cultivated and promoted by the sponsors of the resistance. But the sponsors of the resistance don't hate Trump merely because he fails to reflect the image of the effete intelligentsia. After all, look how they've rehabilitated George W. Bush. No, there's more to it. It seems like Trump threatens the political establishment, both sides of the state of the aisle. And the newspapers are fighting back, etc., etc., and Julian Assange agreed, somewhat reservedly, but he agreed. Most importantly, however, Trump has represented a thin line of defense, however tenuous, of American liberties that stand in the way of global and governmental and extra-governmental order that thrives on lockdowns, masking, muscling, banning, blacklisting, downranking, memory-holding, gaslighting, deleting, canceling, censoring, pre-censoring, and obliterating dissent and dissenters. Including remarks. Regardless of the election outcome, however, repressive and propagandistic governmentalities, including academia, cultural institutions, the culture industries, information and intelligence technologies, mass media, political movements, social media, woke corporations, and more, are combining to effect a totalitarian creep under which its subjects are complicit in their own subjugation and hell-bent to impose it on others. Whether Trump or not Trump has finally declared the winner of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, we're in for the battle of our lives. A constellation of state and state-extended apparatuses has openly declared war on liberty on us. We are all thought criminals now. My last book. Risk aversion will no longer do. What we risk by being risk averse is everything that makes human life worth living. In the face of an enemy that brazenly revels in its totalitarian character, it is time to put everything on the line for liberty.